For its fifth anniversary Akim Monet Side by Side Gallery present its 15th exhibition “Der Kandidat”, George Grosz and the 2016 election. The visitor explores the electoral process of this year's American presidential candidacy through a compilation of outstanding works on paper by German-American artist George Grosz, side by side with images pulled from current affairs, newspaper clippings, and books from the German interwar period through to contemporary.

Arndt Art Agency (A3) is pleased to present Marina Cruz’s first solo exhibition which represents the artist’s European debut.

Mend and Amends presents Filipino artist Marina Cruz’s new body of work in the form of six medium to large-scale oil on canvas paintings. The Philippines is renowned for its strong painting tradition established by classically trained artists such as Juan Novicio Luna in the 19th century, and later, Fernando Cueto Amorsolo in the 20th century. Belonging to new generation of contemporary Filipino artists, Cruz continues this trajectory purporting a striking realist technique through the articulation of precise brushstrokes and detailing. Having completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, Cruz has sustained her investigation into the formal qualities of painting since being awarded the prestigious Filipino art prize the Ateneo Art Award in 2008.

Cruz’s central topic of dress via painterly surfaces enlivens connections to Italian Renaissance painting, such as in the work of Duccio di Buoninsegna and Giotto di Bondone from the early 14th century who featured figures draped in material articulated via sinuous lines and shapes in brilliant colours. The artist cites the influence of Classical painters from the 17th century such as Dutch Master painter Rembrandt and Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens as inspiration during formative years spent at art school. Here, textiles were inextricably paired with that of the human figure, tied to the the tradition of portraiture. The abstract forms of the garment suggested the body of the wearer beneath. Later in the 20th century, painters such as Paul Cézanne, the Cubists and Henri Matisse positioned drapery more prominently in the sphere of still life painting featuring inanimate objects, following the foundations laid by Dutch and Flemish painters in the 17th century. In positioning fabric as an ornamental accompaniment, the relationship with the human figure became disassociated.

Drawing upon this legacy steeped in art history, Cruz’s work is concerned with this interplay between the formal realist qualities of painterly depiction and that of the intangible connection of the life of the invisible wearer. Known for her interest in exploring ideas concerning fragility, imperfection, beauty, authenticity and memory, this preoccupation with clothing was inadvertently triggered when discovering a range of family heirlooms. Cruz elaborates: “This exhibition is a continuation of my artistic practice on looking closely at the use of fabric as a surface and symbol of a person. I carefully observe the relationships of fabric and skin, as object and subject, its forms and textures, sensual and beautiful amidst imperfections and flaws. This fascination with textiles began fifteen years ago. At that time I was looking at various materials, blankets and clothing, and found my mother and siblings’ baptismal dresses. It was a pivotal moment. I observed that the garments and babies’ dresses were so beautiful, yet damaged. They became brittle over time. It made me reflect on how small my own mother was. Touching the garments and smelling their unique scent gave me goosebumps. Imagining my mother so fragile and tiny as a baby was both magical and surreal. I began utilising the dresses as a subject matter, and in the process I was able to learn about my family history.”

Cruz’s paintings allude to, yet are devoid of the human figure. Most commonly featuring details of fabric that fill the entire frame of her canvases, there is a definitive exclusion of a figurative presence in these musings. In a rare instance, Cruz provides an overview of an entire garment in “Mend Me” (2016) within the show. Featuring a delicate rippled pink dress splayed on a black background, the work acts as an index and anchor, tying together her new suite of paintings.

Evident in these new pieces, Cruz’s work oscillates between representation and abstraction. Akin to still life paintings, the works are distinctly object-based, yet highly concentrated. Examining the depiction of clothing—specifically dresses—its form and textural qualities, the artist’s formal compositions allow for close analysis of sections of material and its condition due to wear and tear over time. The artist’s ability to isolate details in fabric such as its folds, its flow and rhythm, but also its imperfections; the tears and the edges that display the fabric’s construction, is striking. For example, seams and individual threads are discernible in the piece “Intertwining Rings and Threads” (2016). In “Whites and Blues Torn and Mended by dragonflies” (2016), “Just balls, and atoms, and planets and a hole” (2016), and “Red Petals Swirling” (2016), printed imagery is masterfully brought to life across the ripple of woven textiles, of coloured dragonflies, balls of yarn and flora. In “White on White of laces and linings burning shadows” (2016) the artist demonstrates her dexterity with the paintbrush in illustrating the intricacies of lace.

Cruz further elucidates her creative process providing an insight into the conceptual underpinnings of the works in Mend and Amends: “in the process of painting these dresses, I deconstruct them. I frame it for the viewer, focussing on a particular detail. The flaws, imperfections, torn and stains are all part of the aging process which both the garment and the wearer cannot avoid. In the meditative and challenging process of painting, one needs to come to terms and accept that the vulnerabilities are part of the beauty, like certain elements of personal history, one need not to dwell on the negatives, but rather, make amends.”

Territories of Commitments at BERLINARTPROJECTS is the first in a series of exhibitions on current photography: Greetings From Now On. This edition brings together the probing work of six Istanbul-based artists, showing how they negotiate and interact with the space which they inhabit – the rapidly expanding Turkish metropolis, conflicted and divided through the current complex urban and societal context and the significant recent changes that the city has been undergoing at one of the crossroads of global conflicts and migration crisis. A storage system based on geolocalisation as a tribute to family memory; abandoned houses and the traces of presence left behind; views of contemporary « flâneurs » in urban space, figuring the crisis; throwing spears to signify the involvement of an artist fighting for individuality in the local and global art market or reactivating archive slides of an environmental NGO. Various voices, multiple intensities. The range of practices is diverse, yet united by a sense of cause, of individual commitment that permeates the works on show. Their artistic stances seem to be rooted and somehow guided by a physical reality and its components; the territory as the site of investigation, production and action (1). The six artists react and comment in and on their environment, sometimes with critical attitude, always with dedication to individuality, to the point that they dream and shape their own form of territory, getting closer to the broadest sense of existential geography. They are involved in defending their position as free thinkers, in a “poetic constantly renewed by the physical and imaginary territories of intimacy”(2).

Ali Taptik’s series The Drift features urban scapes, images captured in the constantly changing city. Infused with a deep sense of instability, Taptik’s works use architecture as well as the territory of the body to give abstract form to the notion of crisis, what the artist calls “the communicable disease of our times”. Responding in particular to the migrant crisis, Taptik proposes strategies of resistance in an urban context through his images of crumbling dilapidated buildings and partially obscured figures, creating his very own brand of street photography. Known for his reflective monochrome works, Yusuf Sevinçli shares a conceptual link with Taptik, capturing the city in moody black and white images. Sevincli responds to the environment that surrounds him, giving expression to intimate thoughts and feelings, walking in slow motion through the metropolis, as if to counteract the frenetic pace of the cities. He taps into urban space, catching the movement of birds in flight or capturing a soap bubble zooming on the buildings, formulating his own relationship to the territory he inhabits. The empty houses of photographer and post-internet artist Zeynep Beler speak volumes about her stance toward real estate politics in Turkey, the abandoned buildings looking both mournful and striking in the bright daylight. Entitled The Estate, the series negotiates the vacant space of these structures, picking out details of ripped out pipes and the marks of torn out kitchen appliances. Life has left this territory, yet all the traces are still there. New patterns appear on the wall, dust settles on the floor. Beler does not give outright critique in these images, she merely shows the territory she finds through her lens. Buğra Erol’s lightbox takes on a larger territory, using slides from his time as a Greenpeace activist to create his work. Here we see social commitment turning into artistic conviction, one cause serving another. Errol shows territory upon territory, site upon site in his installations, shaping landscapes and urban scenes to form words, using his personal engagement in the ecological cause to serve his new purpose – a commitment to artistic forms of expression. Moving from a larger territory to a more intimate one, Seza Bali’s One Man Show is a series of letters containing business cards collected by her father who was a traveling salesman in Turkey. Spanning different cities and countries, the letters show the marks of wear and tear, the envelopes partially ripped or moulded to the shape of the stack of cards arranged by country. Bali here draws attention to her father’s unique archiving system, using a family anecdote to make a broader statement about how we classify geographical space – everyone has his own particular method of filing away information, often leading to political conflict on a more global level. A personal approach to art is also what characterises Joana Kohen’s practice, whose works show her fighting for her position as a female artist in Turkey and strongly engaging in the gender discourse – a conceptual territory as well as a political one. Her Future Female shows the artist throwing a spear over three different screens without revealing the target, aiming her best shot perhaps at those people in society that would stop her and other women from leading successful artistic careers. The piece sees Kohen specifically negotiating the socio-political environment she inhabits through time-based media.
(Text: Katja Taylor)

Heavy contrasts are predominant in the works of “OK BOY”, the most recent body of work by Berlin-based artist XOOOOX. It is comprised of large black and white canvases whose monochromism is at times interrupted by mostly primary colors. Getting closer to the works, one quickly realizes that these contrasts are less subject to a fixed concept, but are developed in an intuitive process. Not only the chiaroscuro of the Black Paintings, but also the violet and yellow colors – characterized by Johannes Itten as a complementary contrast – arise after a long process of layering and overpainting. What all of the works have in common is the act of strongly kinetic painting, be it priming backgrounds, blackening surfaces or quick gestures with the spray can. The technique of this painter, who approaches the canvas without a paintbrush, intuitively spreads the color with his bare hands, is reminiscent of works of abstract expressionism, the likes of Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline who also based the effects of their work in a very strongly physically act of painting.

The Black Paintings draw their strength from the negation of the canvas as a limiting space and deletion the existing through blackening. Simultaneously, they steer the focus to details, a typeface or they create contours as an image in negative. In the history of art the color black often takes on radical positions. From the complete and total reduction of painting (Ad Reinhardt) through to postulating, that this is the most active of all colors (Pierre Soulages) – in focused confrontation with black a powerful aura arises, which is also tangible in the Black Paintings by XOOOOX.

A certain performative character is always inherent in the works by XOOOOX. The practice of constant layering and overpainting implies a temporal level, which is demonstrated par exellence in the work “Langusta”: The spray can applies delicate vertical lines, an almost meditative process which comes to an end with the medium's exhaustion. But not only this method of painting, also the choice of the painting materials fits in the context of transience. Combining acrylic, oil and spray lacquer, the artist provokes uncontrollable reactions, in which color layers shine through or burst open as an effect of the liquids' hydrophobia, thus exposing the work's previous conditions. In this context, the expression “OK”, which also appears in the works, can be read as a finding of a desired state.

Braco Dimitrijević arrived in Berlin as one of the DAAD guests in 1976 along with On Kawara, Malcolm Morley, Dan Graham, Yvonne Rainer, among others. Coming to grips with Berlin, which at that time was surrounded by a wall and packed with War World II memories, was hard for a young man who grew up in post war Yugoslavia. But after an initial period of getting accustomed to the city, a process in which René Block Galerie played an important role, Berlin proved to be a great inspiration for the artist during an extremely prolific period in his career.

Invited by René Block for a solo exhibition in his gallery on Schaperstrase, in September of 1976, Dimitrijević realized an important public work when he hung a blown up portrait of a woman, a Casual-Passer-By, on the facade of the Hochschule der Künste on Steinplatz. Dimitrijević was already internationally known for similar works, which were realized in Paris, Naples, Zagreb, Venice and in Kassel for documenta 5 in 1972.

That same year another very important cycle of Braco Dimitrijević’s oeuvre started in Berlin. For the first time he was given permission to make installations incorporating original master works from a museum, the Berlin Neue Nationalgalerie, which offered paintings by Mondrian, Kandinsky, Picasso, Manet. In these works with the generic title Triptychos Post Historicus the artist confronts and unites high art, everyday life and nature, changing forever the relationship between the museum collection and the contemporary artist by using existing art works as ‘ready mades’ and as starting points for creating other works of art. Triptychos Post Historicus marked a new departure not only in Dimitrijević’s oeuvre but proved to be prophetic for the ‘appropriation’ tendency which started in the 1980s, as well as being a catalyst for changing curators' attitudes towards art historical chronology.

Berlin, being a city full of historical references, was also an inspiration for a series of photographic pieces titled This Could be a Place of Historical Interest, which were later shown at documenta 6. Paradoxically, these photographs of anonymous sites don’t possess any historical grandeur, but they efficiently question the notion of ‘historical importance’.

The most spectacular work Braco Dimitrijević realized in Berlin is the monument in the garden of the Schloss Charlottenburg. The project, which he initiated during his stay in the city in 1976, was completed in 1979 with the financial assistance of the Berlin Senat, Berlin Lottery, DAAD and Schloss Chalottenburg. It is a 10 meter high, white Carrara marble obelisk, erected in honour of Peter Malwitz’s birthday, a ‘regular’ person that the artist met by chance. Dimitrijević dedicated the obelisk to this passerby's date of birth by engraving with gilded letters in four languages 11 March – This Could be a Day of Historical Importance. This ‘obelisk beyond history’, as the artist put it, is the most monumental conceptual art work ever made. Today visitors can find this monument at the end of the Schloss Charlottenburg garden, still bearing witness to an era when the most adventurous art projects were possible.

Daniel Marzona will present an important selection of Braco Dimitrijević’s work from this period.

Braco Dimitrijević was born in Sarajevo in 1948. From 1968 to 1971 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb; 1971-1973 post graduate studies at St Martin’s School of Art in London. He received the Major Award of Arts Council of Great Britain in 1978. In 1993 he was made Chevalier des Arts et de Lettres in France. He lives in Paris.

Braco Dimitrijević has had 160 solo exhibitions including shows at Tate Gallery, London; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; MUMOK, Vienna; Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg etc.
This year the major retrospective of his work was held at GAM (Museum of Modern Art) in Turin.

The long list of group exhibitions also includes three participations in documenta in Kassel (1972, 1977 and 1992), five participations in Venice Biennale (1976, 1982, 1990, 1993, 2009), São Paulo Biennale, ‘Rhetorical Image’ at the New Museum, New York, “Magiciens de la Terre” at Centre G. Pompidou in Paris etc. This year he took part in “Conceptual Art in Britain” Tate Gallery London, “Transmissions” Museum of Modern Art New York. Currently he is exhibiting at ZKM Karlsruhe in “Art in Europe 1945-1968”.

Dimitrijević's works are in 80 public collections including Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musee National d’Art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne etc.

Thanks to the positive resonance of ONE/ other presented earlier this year at the Independent New York and OTHER/ one featured at the Independent in Brussels,
Delmes & Zander are merging the two exhibition concepts into one show featuring a selection of portraits and self-portraits simultaneously in both their Berlin and Cologne galleries. ONE / OTHER will show how the portrait as well as the self-portrait unabashedly mirrors the artist behind the work no matter if he portrays himself or whether he is portraying the other. Independently of their subject, the photographs and drawings reveal everything about their authors and their yearnings for a romanticised identity, no matter on which side of the camera or canvas. Evident in the works is a serialized, obsessive impulse to repeatedly pin down an image or identity that is manifestly idealized.

William Crawford portrays himself at the heart of his sexual fantasies: a graphic and detailed mise en scène in which Crawford is king. In his bright coloured paintings, Alexander Lobanov poses bravely, adorned by a Kalashnikov and Soviet symbolism – the image of a fearless man, a classical hero.

At times the portraits depict their authors as sufferers, preyed upon by the load of the world: Michail Paule is the threatened figure at the center of a phantasmagorical and uncanny place. Aurel Iselstöger's self-portraits illustrate him with a grotesque smile across his face, as if his mouth were torn but shut in silence, eyes to the ground. In the photo collages of Obsession, an unknown author who portrays women at the stake ready to burn or on their knees before decapitation, also pastes himself into the work both as the executioner as well as a victim.

Paul Humphrey repeatedly shuts the eyes of his subjects in the act of drawing, turning his Sleeping Beauties into docile women, innocent and powerless; Morton Bartlett shapes his dolls with his own hands, small in size and with childlike obedience, then photographs them as if for his his own private family album. The portraits of Margret, taken in the impenetrable complicity of a love affair set in the 1970s, transform her into an idealized creation of her lover and employer Günter K.. Similarly, Eugene von Bruenchenhein turns his wife Marie from exotic princess to tinseltown temptress in the photos shot in the intimacy of their hermetical domesticity.

In its painstaking rigour, the works often acquire an archival, sequential character. This is not only the case with Miroslav Tichy, who set out to photograph one hundred women a day, but also with Type 42, the encyclopedic body of anonymous work taken of female movie stars or even in Margarethe Held's lifework documented in The Uncontrollable Universe: an attempt to pin down the chaos unleashed by inner visions in a publication which brings together pictures bestowed upon her from the beyond.

In ONE / OTHER it becomes clear that the works are always an end in itself: a necessary endeavor to shape an image and to make it compatible with the artists innermost fantasies. The result is a many-layered exploration of self-reflection and an oftentimes surprising study on the means and mirrors that are chosen to make wishful thinking real,
be it in the shape of one or the other.